Tom Hayden, the Complicated Radical

In the pre-dawn hours of June 7, 1968, in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I was standing vigil at the coffin of Robert F. Kennedy, who had died the day before at the hands of an assassin. In shifts of six or eight—a half-century has dimmed the exact memory—campaign aides, friends, colleagues, supporters took their turns.

One of those was a 28-year-old man whose presence might have seemed puzzling at the least. In the course of six years, Tom Hayden had migrated from an intellectual advocate of participatory democracy to an increasingly disaffected political outsider. One of the leading voices of the increasingly restive, even violent American left, Hayden wrote sympathetically of the rioters in Newark, New Jersey; he’d traveled twice to North Vietnam to meet with the leaders engaged in a war against the United States; he spoke, with growing sympathy, of “revolution,” one in which violence at some level night be inevitable. Yet here he was, weeping in a corner of the cathedral, mourning a man many of his associates saw as a wholly corrupt, irredeemable creature of the political system.

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Hayden’s presence there helps explain why, for so many of us who came to political engagement in the 1960s, Tom Hayden was so central a figure; and why his death hit with special force so many decades later when we learned that he died Sunday in Santa Monica. As much as any figure of that era, he lived in a way crystallized by a quotation from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: that “a man should share the passion and action of his time, on peril of being judged not to have lived.” And while Hayden is remembered by later generations, if at all, as a figure embedded in protest and upheaval, glimpsed as part of a black-and-white montage with Buffalo Springfield in the soundtrack and his ex-wife Jane Fonda occupying a somewhat larger share of the picture, he should more accurately be seen as a figure who embodied the complicated mix of aspirations, and some of the illusions, that affected so many in those times.

He was only 21 when he joined with a few dozen contemporaries at a labor camp in rural Michigan to form a new political organization, linked neither to the network of liberal groups of the day nor to remnants of the Old Left. The group called itself Students for a Democratic Society, and Hayden was principal author of its manifesto, a 25,000 word declaration called the “Port Huron Statement.”

Looking at the document now is a striking reminder of just how different the early 1960s were from the later years in that decade. Vietnam was an all but invisible brushfire; the burgeoning civil rights movement embodied nonviolence, in sit-ins and Freedom Marches. (There hadn’t been a significant “race riot” in any American city since World War II.) Students were not rampaging across campuses, but were petitioning for an end to parietal hours for women and a greater voice in campus life. The whole tone of the statement reflects not some grandiose vision of an international socialist movement, but a concern for the individual caught up in the gears of large, impersonal institutions. It takes its frame from social critics of the era like Paul Goodman (who wrote “Growing Up Absurd”) and C. Wright Mills.

“The goal of man and society,” Hayden wrote, “should be human independence: a concern not with . . . popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic. . . .This kind of independence does not mean egotistic individualism—the object is not to have one’s way so much as it is to have a way that is one’s own.” (You can gauge the power of this idea by seeing its echo years later in Hillary Rodham’s famous commencement speech at Wellesley in 1969, when she said: “our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.”).

Though SDS in later years would be seen as a snake pit of mindless pseudo-revolutionary hysteria, the organization that emerged from Port Huron was far removed from any notion of “revolution.” It wanted an end to nuclear testing, expanded rights for conscientious objectors, strong civil rights laws. Hard as it is to remember, SDS endorsed Lyndon Johnson’s reelection in 1964 with the slogan: “Part of the way with LBJ.”

What changed, of course, was the rapid darkening of national life with the escalation of the war in Vietnam and the explosion of racial and generational upheaval in cities and on campuses. Hayden was in Newark, working on an anti-poverty project, when the riots broke out in which 26 people were killed. In a lengthy account of the riots, Hayden was unblinking about the inevitable, if not justified, resort to violence from the black community.

“When the riot broke out,” he wrote. “the generations came together. The parents understood and approved the defiance of their sons that night. ... The Negro middle class and ‘respectable’ working people participated heavily. ... Well-dressed couples with kids in their cars were a common sight.” And, Hayden concluded, “the middle class’s willingness to consider rioting legitimate made it more likely that a riot would happen.”

In the years that followed, Hayden found himself increasingly in the orbit of radical dissenters. He helped organize the protests at the 1968 Chicago convention that led to the lengthy trial of him and six other members of the “Chicago Seven” for conspiracy and inciting riots (their convictions were overturned because of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct). He became a leading figure in the anti-war movement, where he and Fonda, who he married in 1973, helped organize protests and campaigned for amnesty for war resisters.

Hayden’s ambiguity about “reform vs. revolution” showed most clearly in his move into politics. In 1976, he mounted a spirited primary campaign for U.S. Senate against Democratic incumbent Sen. John Tunney (I was working with Tunney’s campaign at the time). Six years later, he was elected to the California Assembly and later the state Senate and ran a series of unsuccessful campaigns for governor of California and mayor of Los Angeles.

In later years, Hayden acknowledged that he’d been “overly romantic about the Vietnamese revolution”—meaning that he had failed to anticipate the victors’ taste for re-education camps and a totalitarian political system. But what struck me in a conversation with him was a sense of regret that the events of the 1960s had pulled him onto a path different from the one he’d imagined.

In preparing a book of “alternate history,” I asked Hayden what would have been different had JFK lived and not escalated the war in Vietnam.

“Everything,” was his answer. There would not have been the conviction among dissidents that the United States was beyond redemption; SDS might not have destroyed itself in a mindless war between Maoists and Weathermen. A growing movement among progressives might have managed to avoid the split between civil rights and peace movement Democrats and the white working class, a split which still troubles the party today.

As for himself?

“I think I would have gone to work on the War on Poverty,” he said with a small smile.

In the Port Huron Statement, Hayden wrote: “We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason and creativity.” No doubt that sounds hopelessly naive or sentimental. But it is a measure of the journey his—and my—generation has taken that there was a time when that seemed a reasonable aspiration. And for all of the twists and turns of his eventful life, it was an aspiration that remained at the heart of Tom Hayden’s work and life.